By Carlo Cipparone, VP of Sales at ContractorXchange
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of attending two great safety events; the OGCA Safety Summit in Vaughan and CSAM: The Safety Conference in Winnipeg. I sat in on talks and spoke with safety leaders, procurement professionals, GCs, and contractors from every corner of the industry.
One conversation kept coming up: Where does contractor risk actually live – and are we doing enough to address it?
The short answer? No. And the data backs it up.
Here’s a stat that stopped me in my tracks at the Summit: 68% of contractor injuries and fatalities come from small contractors – typically companies with fewer than 10 employees. And here’s the uncomfortable truth that came with it: as the size of the contractor decreases, the risk increases.
This isn’t just anecdotal. Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner recently released its first-ever Construction Death Review on falls from heights, examining 26 fatal incidents between 2017 and 2023. Half of those fatalities involved employers with fewer than 10 employees. Despite 77% of the workers having completed working at heights training, 63% were not properly protected by fall protection equipment at the time of their incident.
The disconnect between training on paper and practice on site is real, and it’s amplified in smaller operations where dedicated safety personnel, formal systems, and consistent oversight simply don’t exist.
This is a systemic issue across Canada. Over 90% of construction firms in this country have fewer than 20 employees. Many are much smaller, crews of just a few workers. These are the companies that make up the backbone of the subcontracting ecosystem, and yet they’re the ones most likely to fall through the cracks of a hiring organization’s compliance process.
Another theme that emerged across both events was the shift in thinking from high-risk jobs to high-risk employees.
Traditionally, we assess risk based on the work being performed: roofing is high-risk, electrical is high-risk, confined space entry is high-risk. And that’s valid. But what became clear in conversations with safety leaders is that the individual performing the work carries risk factors that are just as important, and yet far harder to capture in a spreadsheet.
The Chief Coroner’s report reinforced this: half of the workers who died in fall-related incidents had been in their roles for less than one year. Workers over 50 were also overrepresented, accounting for 35% of fall-related deaths despite making up less than 20% of the construction workforce. These are worker-level risk factors – experience, age, fitness for duty – that traditional prequalification processes rarely capture.
The conversation is evolving from “is this a dangerous job?” to “is this the right person, with the right preparation, for this specific task?” And if your contractor management process can’t account for that, you’re carrying more risk than you realize.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. R v. Greater Sudbury made it clear that hiring organizations cannot offload liability simply by hiring a contractor. If you introduce risk through a contractor, you bear responsibility, even if the contractor controls the day-to-day work. That 2023 Supreme Court decision fundamentally changed the risk calculus for every organization in Canada that engages contractors.
And Greater Sudbury isn’t the only legal precedent organizations need to worry about. Bill C-45 – the Westray Bill- amended the Criminal Code to hold organizations and individuals who direct work criminally liable for failing to take reasonable steps to protect workers. Born from the 1992 Westray Mine disaster that killed 26 miners in Nova Scotia, the law means that workplace safety failures aren’t just a regulatory matter; they can result in criminal negligence charges, with penalties up to life imprisonment for individuals and unlimited fines for organizations.
After two conferences and dozens of conversations, here’s what I keep coming back to: the gap between what organizations think they know about their contractor network and what they actually know is wider than most people are comfortable admitting.
Too many organizations are still managing contractor compliance through decentralized processes; spreadsheets, emails, inconsistent standards across departments. They may have visibility into their top-tier contractors, but the smaller subs, the ones statistically most likely to have an incident, are often the least scrutinized.
What encouraged me most at both the OGCA Safety Summit and CSAM was the willingness of people across industries to confront these issues head-on. The conversations aren’t just about checking boxes anymore. They’re about understanding where risk actually hides, who it affects, and what it takes to build a system that keeps people safe – not just on paper, but on the job site.
If your organization is ready to take a harder look at your contractor risk, join our upcoming webinar on March 12!
